3 Easy Ways To Drive Sales With Great Customer Service

If you’re like me, you’re occasionally frustrated with companies that have bad customer service. Maybe the service is bad because there is no way to talk with a real person to get your question answered quickly, or it takes the company days to respond to your email question, or the company is asleep on social media and doesn’t respond to your tweets or Facebook questions (This really gets me fired up. So much so, I’m gonna write a separate article about it another time).

As a small, nimble company, this is an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and endear customers to you and your brand. And most importantly, drive sales.

How do I know? Because I’ve done so with WeMontage and it’s generated tens of thousands of dollars in sales for me.

I’m going to share three things I’ve done, that many of you can do too, that will help you give better customer service and generate more sales in the process.

In-App CRM

When a user creates an account at WeMontage.com they immediately receive a message that appears to come directly from me-well, I guess it is from me, since I created it. Here’s a picture of what pops up on the user’s screen.

Yep, that’s my ugly mug. 🙂

I can’t tell you how many comments I receive from users about this; they are blown away by receiving a message of this type from the CEO of a company. And they especially love that I include my phone number. I use Intercom.io for this service and the $70 a month (or whatever it is) I pay is nothing compared to how many sales this application has generated for me and WeMontage.

Obviously, giving people your phone number doesn’t scale once your business becomes really large. But as Paul Graham said in his viral article about startups and what it takes to get them going, founders and business owners at first have to Do Things That Don’t Scale.

Get The Phone Number In The Contact Form

At WeMontage, we asked for the customer’s phone number in the contact form without knowing it would be beneficial. Below is the actual form we use on the WeMontage contact page.

What’s great about this is once the customer sends their request and, if we end up exchanging a few emails, or if I think the question is too complicated to respond to via email, I just pick up the phone and call them.

People are BLOWN AWAY by this. I’ve gotten so many sales as a result of this one, simple thing. This approach really stands out because we are in an age where, increasingly, companies are not communicating via telephone.

Respond Quickly To Email Requests

I know this seems like common sense, but I can’t tell you how many companies don’t do this. Not getting back to me promptly when I have a question, especially if I’m paying for your service, sets my hair on fire.

Just last week this happened to me with a WordPress plugin provider who took three days to respond to my email question-twice. When I brought it to their attention, their excuse was they don’t have enough people. Seriously? That’s not my problem.

I had to resolve the issue on my own-after I paid for the premium tier of their product, and spent about an hour of my time. In the immortal words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for dat!”

Can you say, #CustomerServiceFail?

For WeMontage, this actually ties into my first recommendation (above) in that when users submit a reply to the pop-up message, it automatically comes to an app on my phone and my email. When I reply to the customer, if they are still on my website, my response pops up in the box on-screen, but it also goes to their email address.

I can’t tell you how many website users I’ve turned into paid customers just by answering emails quickly. I mean, I responded to a few emails, and within minutes the user’s paid order came through.

You Can Do This!

All three of these suggestions are rock-solid. I recognize the in-App CRM suggestion may not work for every business type and may also require some software engineering skills, but the other two suggestions are super-simple. And all three WILL make you money.

Are there a few things you do to offer great customer service that have helped you differentiate your business from your competitors, and have generated sales? I’d LOVE to hear about them in the comments.

Thanks to Janine Huldie’s comment, I checked with the founders of intercom.io on twitter and learned there are two WordPress plugins. If anyone tries them, please let me know how they work. And that’s what I’m talking about with great customer service-those guys got right back to me.

Morning, Janine! It’s not a plug in for wordpress. Here’s the link to their site: https://www.intercom.io/ It might be worth asking them if they will offer some variant for wordpress though. They just closed a big round of funding and have been making lots of improvements. And if you contact them via email or on twitter, they do respond. Let me know what they say b/c if they have something coming for wordpress, I’d love to update the post.

I just had a terrible customer service experience. I bought a product on Amazon which broke within the first couple weeks of using it. I also bought extra parts for it before it broke, because I was so excited about it. With the craziness going on here, my husband contacted the company directly, and they took their sweet time getting back to him and the end result, they said the buyer that sold it on Amazon wasn’t authorized so they are not going to fix or replace it. Keep in mind this is a $50 product…so it’s would be well within their ability to do either of those things. The fact that it broke right away makes me think it’s not a great product but I bought on the recommendation of a family member who has one. We received this final email from them yesterday, 2 days after we could return it to Amazon. My husband has since contacted Amazon, but I am so irritated with that manufacturing company right now, I am not sure what to do. Normally I don’t like to call companies out like that on social media, but my husband actually said in his letter back to them, good thing my wife has a successful blog, if we can stop one other person from buying from you… (he didn’t ask me first, but reading their reply to him I understand why he made the comment). Of course, dead air from them. I can’t even fathom in this day and age, the horrendous service we received from them…with a defective product. I am pretty much disgusted.

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Hi, I'm James: a husband, co-founder of the world's cutest twins, published author, and a tech founder of WeMontage.com.
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